THE DOWER HOUSE
Malcolm Macdonald
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First world edition published 2011
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright © 2011 by Malcolm Macdonald.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Macdonald, Malcolm, 1932–
The Dower House.
1. Holocaust survivors – Fiction. 2. Communal living –
England – Hertfordshire – Fiction. 3. Great Britain –
Social conditions – 1945– – Fiction. 4. Love stories.
I. Title
823.9′14-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-108-8 (ePub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8061-1 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-368-7 (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
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for Nathan
the Perl
among our family’s many jewels
Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation . . . If one is to record . . . life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.
from The Journey Not the Arrival Matters – Leonard Woolf
Thursday, 15 April 1947
Willard A Johnson – the A stood for nothing (except, appropriately enough, itself) – emerged from the gloom of Hamburg’s Hauptbahnh of with the feeling that he had somehow fallen into a time warp. The gap-toothed skyline was still as the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah had arranged it. There were the same piles of rubble, and between them the same makeshift carts threaded their way, drawn by men, dogs, even the occasional horse if it was strong enough to fetch a better price between the shafts than on the table. Nothing had changed.
A good omen?
Move! Stop distracting yourself. She’ll say no, of course. And can you blame her? You can’t treat a woman like that and expect anything else.
One taxi stood at the rank but it was waiting for a British colonel – or so the driver said.
He turned up the collar of his Burberry and triced himself into the drizzle-laden wind as he made his way down to the waterfront. April in Europe! People watched him with undisguised curiosity. A well-dressed, well-fed foreign civilian was not so common a sight on the Hamburg waterfront in that long cold spring of 1947.
What would she think, the moment she set eyes on him again?
How could you ever tell with Marianne?
What would she say? She might just stare at him and then maybe slam the door in his face.
Assume she would at least open the door. Yes, she’d do that, if only to leave him in no doubt that, when she slammed it again, she meant it.
An inch, then. If she gave him that inch . . . how, in two seconds, could you make your face say, ‘I’ve traveled four thousand godawful miles and now I’m standing here before you because for almost six months I sat in my office, stateside, trying to work and all I could do was stare at the Mystic River and watch how the ripples turned into your face and because when I tried to design houses the only shapes my pencil wanted to form were the letters of your name and because every female I saw on every street in Boston became you in the distance and not-you close up and because I was forever prepared for some magic to let me meet you around every corner’?
And that wasn’t one thousandth part of it.
A seagull, made nervous by his sudden immobility, backed off to the edge of the quay, gave a single, plaintive mew, and launched itself into the rain. The port was busy. Big, ocean-going merchantmen, most still in camouflage, standing at the quays, being pillaged by cranes. Materiel for the new Germany. Or an age-old Germany?
The seagull was still wheeling overhead, waiting for him to move on. His eye soared with it, envying the creature its freedom.
Freedom! Two years ago he’d have been arrested by the Gestapo, just for walking along here like this – looking at ships, reading their names, guessing their cargoes. He’d have been shot, too, in these civilian clothes.
Beyond the fish market, where St-Pauli merges into Altona, he left the river bank and headed north toward the wasteland that had once been Kleine Freiheit and the Reeperbahn.
Here, too, nothing had changed. The buildings and punctured façades stood just as the firestorm had left them, five years back. Here and there a few householders had built shanty homes amid their own ruins, cleaning off the original bricks and reusing them with lime and sand. But the other kinds of premises, the bars, brothels, and nightclubs, which had made the name St-Pauli notorious around the world, stood roofless and hollow. The most dangerous of their shells had been levelled, reduced to neat, Teutonic stacks of brick, ready for the day when the wages of sin would be measured in something more bankable than coffee, butter, cigarettes, and nylons.
The occasional coincidence of such gaps, lining up across several blocks, revealed the wilderness that lies, buried but undead, beneath all the works of man. Great stretches of the city now bore the incongruous air of a park, a mighty, open space clothed in ragwort and fireweed as far as the eye could see – which, on a day like this was not so very far. Within half a mile the greens and yellows and magentas merged into an infinite, damp, unrelieved gray.
And somewhere out there, just beyond that near-horizon (just as she had been around every Boston corner) was Marianne.
Or perhaps she had patched it up with her parents and gone home to Sweden?
‘Unfortunately, mein Herr, Fraülein von Ritter no longer lives here. I can give you her address in Gothenburg.’
Or worse: ‘Fraülein von Ritter? Ach, die arme Marianne! Alas, you come too late, Herr Major . . .’
No – don’t even think it!
Or worse yet – but very thinkable: ‘Fraülein von Ritter? But she got married last week. It was the talk of Hamburg – surely you heard? She and the Baron are honeymooning in Austria right now.’
Anywhere near Mauthausen, I wonder?
Oh, for Christ’s sake! That’s why you’re here now. That’s why you’ve endured these months of misery – all because of stupid cracks like that. Mauthausen? She had nothing to do with Mauthausen.
Her last known address was in a narrow cul-de-sac off the square around the Brunnentor – a little oasis of old buildings that had survived the firestorm. He remembered a photograph Tony Palmer had shown him, taken the day after the last of the Gomorrah air raids. It showed the twisted, smouldering chassis of a fire-engine straddling a street. It had obviously been ignited by the flames; yet there, a hundred metres beyond it, stood trees in leaf and buildings that were not even scorched. A miracle.
‘God is just a throw of the dice,’ Tony had commented. ‘At least this war has taught us that.’
Come to thin
k of it, Tony must still be somewhere in this shell of a city, beavering away at its rebirth and teaching the Germans the veddy-veddy English art of losing gracefully.
The day was suddenly more cheerful. Perhaps, if it turned out that Marianne really had gone back to Sweden, or was married – or something – he’d look up his ol’ buddy and they’d get drunk together like in the old days – like eighteen months back.
Like before they liberated Mauthausen.
He found himself facing her door. Still nothing had changed. The image that all Boston had not been able to efface slipped immaculately over the present reality. He raised his finger to the bell . . . but found himself paralysed. He stared at his hand in disbelief.
Move, he commanded.
It refused.
But the door opened anyway. Not a mere inch, but all the way, silently, on well-greased hinges.
A thin, starved-looking woman, mousey-haired and fortyish, stared belligerently up at him. ‘Wass wollen Sie?’ she snapped – and then sneezed. She pretended not to notice what she left on Willard’s raincoat.
‘Ich suche Fräulein von Ritter,’ he said.
‘Lincolnstrasse,’ she snapped, and slammed the door.
He turned, put his hands in his pockets, and thrust out his raincoat, hoping that the rain would wash it clean. But the name of the street left him with a sinking feeling, for Lincolnstrasse was one of the less-damaged side streets off the Reeperbahn. If she were truly there, he must have walked within a hundred metres of her.
A St-Pauli Girl? And not the buxom Bavarian blonde on the American beer bottle but a sad, semi-naked waif in a window. No – surely Marianne would rather swallow her pride and go back to her parents than . . . anything rather than that.
Lincolnstrasse was only five minutes’ brisk walk away; he saw her immediately he entered it at the northern end – sitting under a café awning, on a folding camp stool, with a sketching easel before her and a young matelot, seated about a yard beyond at one of the café tables. She was sketching on-the-spot portraits for cash! It was, indeed, a kind of prostitution – the bartering of a talent that deserved so much more.
The sailor couldn’t take his eyes off her. All her portraits of men must have that fixed stare, the gaze of men who cannot really believe their luck – to be licensed to gawp at such beauty for . . . how long? Four or five minutes? Ten? Short time, Liebchen, or long?
This particular session seemed to be nearing its end. Even from a distance Willard could see that most of the page was filled. He hastened toward her, unsure what he’d do when he got there but determined to let no one else take the sailor’s place. And there he was in luck, for no one else was in line – though three lads across the street looked as if they were trying to make up their minds. As he drew near he pulled his fedora down as far as it would go and, lowering his head, took the matelot’s chair as soon as it fell vacant.
She did not look his way until the man had paid her – a few coins, less than a mark – into her shaking hand. Then Willard raised his head.
Their eyes met. He wanted to say something smart . . . romantic . . . heartfelt . . . anything. But no words came. She let out her breath in one long sigh. ‘It’s true,’ she whispered.
‘It’s me, anyway.’ He hardly recognized his own voice. ‘I can’t live without you.’
She found her voice then. ‘I watched you come all the way down the street.’ She tilted her head toward one of the café tables where, he now saw, she had placed a GI shaving mirror. ‘I said to me – myself – I said, “It’s not true . . . it’s not true . . . it’s not true . . .” all the way. Still I not can believe . . .’ She reached out and touched his face.
He clasped her hand to his cheek, her cold to his numbness. ‘Fact is . . . I haven’t known one single day’s happiness since . . . since I . . . I . . . was such a goddam fool, Marianne. There!’
She reached out her thumb and massaged his lips. ‘Will . . . ard!’
‘Think we can start over?’ he asked.
‘No!’
‘No?’
‘No – we start where we left off. Already enough time is wasted.’
A waiter came out and began clearing a nearby table.
‘Coffee?’ Willard asked her.
She lowered her arm and nodded. ‘Black – he knows. Anton’s his name.’
‘Hey, Anton, ol’ buddy! Black coffee for the lady and café-au-lait for me – with milk!’
Marianne laughed. ‘I’d forgotten that one! Oh, Willard!’ She reached out and this time gripped his arm. ‘It’s so good. So good!’
He caught up her hand and kissed it fervently. ‘The goodness lies exclusively on the other side,’ he said, paraphrasing a bit of Swedish etiquette she had once taught him. ‘I was ready for you to turn away . . . hit me . . . shout at me . . . spit at me. Ha! Instead it was that lady . . . or that thing at the . . . where you live . . . she spat at me.’ He tried to show her but the rain had done its work.
‘Frau Becker? To spit at you? Tskoh!’
‘She didn’t mean to, I guess. She just sneezed but she saw where it went and she just did nothing.’
Anton returned with their coffees. ‘And Schwarzwälderkirsch torte?’ he asked.
‘What else have you got?’
‘Schwarzwälderkirsch torte.’
‘Right – just leave the plate. You counted them, huh?’
The man merely smiled as he left them.
Willard picked up the mirror. ‘I guess you have to watch behind you if you work around here.’ He peered at the back of it. ‘Hey! Whaddya know!’
She nodded as she bit hungrily on her torte. ‘I still also have that packed bag,’ she said through a mouthful of filo. ‘Yours, too.’
He replaced his ex-mirror. ‘That’s good. You should eat. You don’t look like you’ve been eating enough.’
‘I knew you’d come back. So I never unpacked.’
‘You really mean it? We head back to your lodging, pick up the bag, and . . . pffft? Hightail it out of town? Really?’
She looked up and down the street. ‘I see nothing to keep us here.’ Her hand reached out and took another slice.
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
‘What?’ she asked – inasmuch as any word could be articulated through such a mouthful.
‘I’m just beginning to realize how . . . I mean, how little I . . . I dared to imagine how awful, how terrible it would have been if you’d just turned your back on me, here, now, and walked away. I . . . I don’t know what I’d have done.’
‘So!’ She swallowed hard and cleared her mouth. ‘We can sit here a bit and have a misery competition to see who was most miserable. Or . . .’
‘Or?’
‘Or you can tell me about where we shall live in America?’
‘First things first. What say we head for Bielefeld and look up good-ol’ Tony and good-ol’ Adam?’
‘But they are in London, working on that big plan.’
Willard laughed. ‘Cute! So I’m not the only one to finagle an early discharge! So? Better still – a honeymoon in London!’
Tuesday, 22 April 1947
Felix Breit reached the cul-de-sac at the eastern end of Curzon Street and climbed the couple of steps into Fitzmaurice Place.
Steps. These of limestone, too.
The occasional car or taxi made its way around Berkeley Square but none entered this short dead-end of a street. At the door to the Lansdowne Club he paused, admiring its English modesty: ‘Number Nine,’ painted across the superport; there was no vulgar brass nameplate. He raised the simple knocker, hesitated, then let it fall once only. His imagination had worked on the words ‘English Gentleman’s Club’ to paint an interior on the scale of the Paris Opera, so he expected to hear cavernous echoes. The knocker fell with a muted thud and without a rebound. After a pause, just as he was about to knock again, the door opened slowly, silently, to reveal a club porter. It opened inwards, which surprised Felix – a further remi
nder that he was no longer really in Europe. With one swift glance, the porter took in the caller’s threadbare scruffiness and was on the point of directing him to the tradesmen’s entrance when Felix said, ‘Mister Wilson, please? Mister Adam Wilson?’
‘Mister Wilson is not here at the moment, sir,’ the man replied grudgingly. ‘Perhaps you would care to leave a message?’
Felix produced a battered visiting card. ‘Mister Wilson, you see. He gave me this card. And this place?’ He pointed superfluously to the club’s address, which was printed below Wilson’s name: 9, Fitzmaurice Place. Scribbled on the back were the words: ‘Breit – if you ever make it to London, look me up. A.W.!’
The porter tried to take the card but Felix clung to it as if it were a Nansen passport (which, in a sense, it was). ‘You’d best come in and wait, Mister . . . er?’
‘Breit. Felix Breit.’ He spoke his name with a certain panache, as if the man should recognize it. He showed the back of the card again.
The porter let him in and took him up a short flight of steps past the reception desk.
Steps. These of marble. Another short flight led to the Crush Room, which was dominated by a large propellor on the far wall. ‘If you wouldn’t mind sitting there, Mister Breit?’ he said. ‘I can, as it happens, telephone Mister Wilson. Those are the morning papers.’
Left alone, Felix tried to read at least the headlines: DOLLAR-LOAN TALKS REACH NEW IMPASSE! But the text danced in a jumble before his eyes. It was partly exhaustion and partly the feverish excitement that had filled him ever since he had set foot on English soil, earlier that morning. He was here at last. He had finally, finally made it!
He rose and crossed the room to look at the propellor more closely, considering it as a piece of sculpture. An abstract. He was becoming more and more seduced by the abstract. The human form . . . well, it was difficult. Understandably.
Below the propellor was a framed pilot’s licence, the first ever issued in Britain – to someone called Brabazon. What a magnificent name! After an ancient Aryan god, no doubt. Progenitor of countless petty gods, Celtic and Saxon. Felix could feel the sculpture itching in his palms already – Laocöon crossed with Mestrovic? No! Brabazon by Breit – pure Breit – of course!
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